Belonging means more than being included. It means feeling understood, accepted, and able to participate without constantly having to explain yourself, hide parts of who you are, or push past exhaustion just to keep up.

What conditions make belonging possible?

The article highlights three conditions:

• Recognition: being understood and taken seriously as a social person, rather than being misread, dismissed, or spoken over.
• Access: being able to participate without overwhelming communication demands, sensory barriers, or time pressures.
• Sustainability: being able to stay engaged over time without burnout, constant masking, or repeated fights for support.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism – Hari Srinivasan, 2026

We recommend that schools adopt a definition of educational inclusion that focuses on, or at minimum includes, pupils’ sense of belonging in their school community. School belonging is an ‘umbrella’ concept, that can include “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenough, 1993, p80), and also whether they “feel that teachers care about students and treat them fairly; get along with teachers and other students, and feel safe at school” (Libbey, 2007, p52). School belonging is measurable, and there is substantial prior research linking it to positive pupil outcomes (e.g. Allen, Kern, Vella-Brodrick, Hattie, & Waters, 2018).

We believe belonging is an essential concept for thinking about inclusion and planning successful policies—so important we included it twice! In addition to adopting a belonging-focused definition of inclusion in Change #1, one of our four planning approaches focuses on facilitating pupil belonging.

Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies

Belonging is a human need. Yet the new psychology shows that it’s also something more. It’s a birthright. It’s a value that defines us human beings and a deeply-felt principle that points the way to solving diverse problems facing individuals, communities, and whole societies today. While this insight might seem new, it is, in fact, as ancient as humanity itself.

The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today

Inclusion as Belonging

As our title signals, we focus on discussing and facilitating inclusion in terms of pupils’ sense of belonging, which is to say learners’ subjective sense of whether or not they are part of their school community, safe, and valued. This connects to a larger research on understanding school belonging, and how it impacts pupils. As discussed in more detail under Approach 1 in the Planning Guidance document, this body of research suggests that it may be an important contributor to pupils’ participation and achievement, rather than following from these later.

Focusing on inclusion-as-belonging emphasises the importance of school experiences, and positions the people in the school community as choice-makers and change-makers. All aspects of school policy matter for inclusion, not “inclusion policies” alone. School culture matters. Neurodivergent children and young people don’t exist in a vacuum, but are strongly affected by the knowledge, beliefs, and choices of those around them. For these many reasons, concepts related to belonging were at the heart of many of the original contributions at the 2022 workshop, and central to priorities for change.

Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies

A sense of not belonging at school can hinder learning and lead to disaffection and active disengagement from learning.

Nearly 80% of Australian students say they ‘didn’t fully try’ in latest Pisa tests | Australian education | The Guardian

There also appears to be a close relationship between the sense of belonging and reading scores across most OECD countries. While there are exceptions, most OECD countries including Australia have experienced declining student engagement with learning and school and declines in PISA results since 2003.

Nearly 4 in 5 Australian Students Didn’t Fully Try in PISA Tests – SOS Australia

A sense of not belonging at school can result in less motivation, effort and participation learning. It and lead to disaffection and active disengagement from learning.

Nearly 4 in 5 Australian Students Didn’t Fully Try in PISA Tests – SOS Australia

Belonging and Psychological Safety

In the hierarchy of needs, psychological safety straddles fulfillment, belonging, and security needs—three of the four basic need categories (figure 3). Once the basic physical needs of food and shelter are met, psychological safety becomes a priority.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Belonging and Legibility

If privilege is not needing to learn, then honor feels like learning enough about people for them to be legible to us.

I have written a lot about legibility as a social status. Being legible is a kind of situational privilege.

Legibility is not the same as visibility. We often confuse the two and our discourse is poorer for the conflation. Being legible is very relational. It happens in relationship to other people. That makes it about social exchanges, or that stuff that coheres our society. When I am visible, you can see me in the way you can see a dog or a lamppost. I am socially alive, as it were. I am a category and I exist.

Being legible requires other people to have the ability to make sense of me. That means I am a thing that exists but that is also supposed to exist, in a given space or conversation or exchange.

Why I Hate* California – essaying

Once again, here I find it helpful to return to the idea of ‘loving perception’ as a means to consider the implications of the above discussion for my own methods. Maria Lugones articulates one notion of solidarity as moving into and traveling with another person in their own world, rather than trying to understand them as thoroughly defined by oppression or resistance as rendered legible within dominant worlds of sense (2003: 79-80). Nick Walker’s theory of neuroqueering recognizes the importance of nonlinguistic and embodied practices of sense-making, including stimming, which are accessible to autistic and other neurominority modes of embodiment (187–191). Together, these theories help me to recognize that solidarity involves learning to inhabit another’s world of sense so that we may better understand their intentions and support their realization in action. It is this act of traveling beyond existing subject destinations based on binary divisions, and it is this movement that turns intentions into sources of sociality and solidarity. My effort to define a narrative theory of agency is aimed at supporting the emergence of new, and more liberatory, worlds of sense.

Narrating the Many Autisms | Identity, Agency, Mattering | Anna Stenni

To act in the world, we must regard ourselves from the first-person perspective, as ‘agents, capable of choice, deliberation, and practical reason’ (Mackenzie 2008: 8 – see Chapter 1). Through discovery, memory, and critical interpretation, we exercise agency over our experiences, even if this does not produce narrative closure or completeness. If we consider ourselves to be part of a community, our practical identity will be intelligible to us insofar as it may also make sense to others within such; in this way, it reflects the ‘modes of personhood’ available to us from without our culture or community (Lucas 2016: 12). For instance, the autistic self-advocacy movement has, contrary to cognitivist models of autism, affirmed that autism is a way of being a person: as Jim Sinclair affirmed, ‘My selfhood is undamaged … I find great value and meaning in my life, and I have no wish to be cured of being myself’ (1992: 302). Within the self-advocacy community, autism is a valid way of being a person, and this requires skepticism toward any approach that regards autism as a core deficit

Narrating the Many Autisms | Identity, Agency, Mattering | Anna Stenni

Presence Without Belonging

You can be present without belonging. You can attend, participate, respond, contribute — and still be lonely. Hari Srinivasan names this directly.

Loneliness, in this framing, is not the absence of others but the felt consequence of being unable to remain with others on terms that are livable.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism — Hari Srinivasan, 2026

Recognition is not only about being seen but about being believed. When autistic people are repeatedly misinterpreted or required to translate their experiences into acceptable forms, social interaction may continue while relational trust erodes. Loneliness in this context reflects epistemic exclusion as much as social absence.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism — Hari Srinivasan, 2026

Accessible conditions enable engagement, whereas inaccessible conditions require endurance. When access is unstable or partial, interaction becomes effortful rather than connective, and loneliness emerges not from absence but from constrained participation.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism — Hari Srinivasan, 2026

This burden is often asymmetric: responsibility for maintaining interaction falls on the autistic person, while the structure of the interaction remains unchanged.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism — Hari Srinivasan, 2026

Designing for sustainability requires shifting responsibility from individuals to environments.

Presence Without Belonging: A Conceptual Analysis of Loneliness in Autism — Hari Srinivasan, 2026

Belonging and Authenticity

Never forget that authenticity and vulnerability are revolutionary in every capacity. Shame is the antithesis of progress.

The Journey of Undoing: An open letter to who needs it — SITI Girl Miami

The purest forms of belonging enable us to exist as unique, authentic beings within a larger whole, and yet to experience that whole within the multiplicity. The following lines in Walt Whitman’s epic poem “Song of Myself” in his evoke this feeling:

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

Belonging and Home

A school struggling with the ravages of American poverty has to first be a home — the kind of home the children may not have at home. A place that is relentlessly safe, that is both calming and exciting, that offers unconditional love, and that offers boundless opportunity.

That ‘home’ must be supportive and accepting, loving and encouraging, and it must provide the biggest possible window on to the world, on to the universe.

A home of opportunity.

What does opportunity look like? First, it looks like trust. It looks like freedom. And it looks like choice.

You must see your school as a home of opportunity | by Ira David Socol | Medium

Belonging and Connection

Belonging isn’t just a connection to other people, but also to place, power, and purpose. The experience of belonging is about connectedness through community, as well as rootedness in a place, a feeling of ownership in shared outcomes, and a sense of mission with others.

Belonging—in this broader sense—isn’t just, as Maslow posited, a human need. It’s a fundamental right. It’s a principle from which all other needs flow. This is to say that belonging—our connectedness to humanity, nature, and meaning—is what animates us to seek food, clothing, shelter, and all the necessities of human survival in the first place.

The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today

In contrast, Indigenous traditions around the world have emphasized broader conceptions of belonging since time immemorial. For the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of the Pacific Northwest, for example, the organizing principle of the interconnectedness of human beings—as well as the natural world—is encapsulated in the organizing principle of Tsawalk_, _meaning “one.” Belonging is a fundamental birthright. 

The New Psychology of Belonging | Psychology Today

Msit No'kmaq
For all the life
The trees
The air
This is how we end our prayer
Way ha
Way ha hey ho

Belonging and Place

Our connection to place happens through a relationship with nature, with the lands on which we live, whether in a forest or a city neighborhood. In an ideal relationship of belonging to place, this relationship is reciprocal: We care for the places where we live and they, in turn, care for us. We have a responsibility toward our lands, which is ultimately a responsibility for our own well-being. When we feel a sense of belonging in a physical place or a natural ecosystem, we feel at home. We feel peace. We don’t simply feel a need to extract whatever we can for our short-term personal benefit. It means we live in reciprocity with nature, and it entails a commitment to honoring, preserving, and enriching this relationship.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

Belonging and Evolution

Belonging has been such a fundamental driver in human culture that nearly all major wisdom traditions of humankind—which contain the oldest stories of who we are—point the way back to it. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī speak of a belonging so elemental that no “inside” or “outside” exists, no self that is separate from the other, no Lover separate from the Beloved.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

Belonging manifests perhaps most obviously through our relationship with people—with one another. We are social beings. There’s an evolutionary dimension to our inherent need for human connection; evidence for this exists in humanity’s common historical origins, and our biology. The survival of human beings in traditional hunter-gatherer societies—which typified human life for the vast majority of our history—depended on small communities of families joining to forage, hunt, and fend off shared threats together.8 Although our societies have changed dramatically since then, and will continue to do so, this fundamental reality remains the same: We require connection with one another.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

Belonging and Power

Belonging is also found in our relationship with power, and our capacity to participate meaningfully in the decision-making structures of the broader whole. Our agency, the ability to make choices in shaping our circumstances, and our capacity to collectively determine our shared future, are all bound up in this dimension of belonging.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

Belonging and Purpose

Belonging through purpose—the ability to create meaning in our lives and to share our gifts with the world—provides a vital sense of “why.” It helps shape our perspectives on where we should be headed and what is right and good. Our sense of purpose is formed, in part, by the cultural and social norms and narratives about ourselves in relation to each other and the world around us. While religion has often informed these perspectives, we can also find belonging by encountering a calling, a personal sense of faith, or an ethical orientation outside of formalized religious structures or institutions.

On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation by Kim Samuel

This Space Is For Us

It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it; “This space,” I whisper to myself, “is for me.” Next to me, I sense my friend has the same electrified feeling. This space is for us.

Members of many marginalized groups have this shared experiential touchstone, this sense of unexpected and vivid belonging and an ardent desire to be able to pass this experience along. Some can remember the precise moment when they were in a space inhabited entirely by people like them for the first time.

Crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced-something radical and taboo in many parts of the world and sometimes even for people in those spaces. The idea that we need our own spaces, that we thrive in them, is particularly troubling for identities treated socially as a negative; why would you want to self-segregate with the other cripples? For those newly disabled, crip space may seem intimidating or frightening, with expectations that don’t match the reality of experience-someone who has just experienced a tremendous life change is not always ready for disability pride or defiance, needing a kinder, gentler introduction.

This is precisely why they are needed: as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground. We need the sense of community for disabled people created in crip space.

How can we cultivate spaces where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion, where we can have difficult and meaningful conversations?

Because everyone deserves the shelter and embrace of crip space, to find their people and set down roots in a place they can call home.

“The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith in “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“

We Will Build It

The spaces where we belong do not exist. We build them with radical love and revolutionary liberation.

Gayatri Sethi, Unbelonging

Take me home where I belong.

But no, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I can't take it anymore

But I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall

Runaway by AURORA

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